Cross-listing/Combining Sections Concept

How can I avoid having to copy everything?

Do you have two or more sections of the same course? Wish you didn't have to copy your assignments and material to each one? Cross-listing allows you to combine courses by adding the students from one section to another. This feature is helpful for instructors who teach several sections of the same course and only want to manage course data in one location.

You end up with one course with two or more sections of students. The course from which you moved students disappears, all the students see the main course. Here all the students from Period 7 will be added to Period 4.

Cuidado! Careful! Warning! Caveats!

  • Cross-list at the beginning of a term. Cross-listing should be done while courses are unpublished. Coursework is retained with the course, not with the section enrollments, so if a published course is cross-listed, all cross-listed enrollments will lose any associated assignment submissions and grades. If you already have content and grades you will lose them from the courses you cross-list.
  • Many curricular resources such as TCI, Studies Weekly, HMH, etc., do not work with cross-listed courses. If you use resources that are linked from Canvas, check with learning_tech@columbus.k12.oh.us to see if they will be impaired by cross-listing.
  • Grade Sync with IC may be affected...
  • Do not Cross-list with a Sandbox Course. This will cause issues with Infinite Campus.
  • It is difficult to remove a cross-listed section from a course. Teachers do not have permission to perform this task. All the grades and submitted student work from the cross-listed section will be deleted. Better be sure.
  • If you have any questions or just want help cross-listing, please email learning_tech@columbus.k12.oh.us.

 

Cross Listing-Pros/Cons

NOTE: Once you choose to cross-list or not cross-list, you must keep it that way all year or you will lose students’ data

Pros:

Cons
  • Allows you to move multiple courses into fewer courses
  • Differentiating activities in Canvas by section
    • Announcements
    • Discussions
    • Assignments
    • Quizzes

  • Easier to manage all content and activities in one course 
    • Creating content
    • Grading and giving feedback
    • Updating content

  • Build content in one place and send to other sections
  • Click on one course on the Dashboard to find all cross-listed courses together
  • Section comparison in the New Analytics could happen easily (Comparing sections against one another)
  • Content and activities live in different courses
  • Updating content and activities has to be done in multiple spots or shared to Commons Links to an external site.
  • Zoom integration doesn’t create separate Zoom links for each section
  • All grading shows up in one gradebook but can be filtered by section
  • Large amount of content in one place, especially on the Modules Page
  • All Content (pages, modules, files) have to be identical for all sections and only activities (assignments, discussions, participations) can be differentiated by section
  • Even though you can’t create all content and activities in the same course, you can easily use the “copy to…” feature to copy content Links to an external site. and activities Links to an external site. to easily other courses

Neutral: if there are other courses that need the same content that can't be cross-listed to one course, an advantage of Canvas is content sharing in the form of: blueprinting, direct share, Commons, Import Tool, or IMSCC Course Files. Do not worry though, if you cannot cross-list, it is not the end of the world.  It is just a few more steps.

 

Cross-listing instructions are on the next page ->